City Island Software

Recently, my commute has (sadly) changed to include a daily trip to Chelsea (the one on Manhattan's west side).  Exploring the possibilities, I decided to try the Metro North Railway to Grand Central, then hop a Citibike for the proverbial last mile (which is really about 2 miles).  For regular use, it's a no-brainer to buy the $95 annual subscription, but to try it out to see if you like it, there's a 24-hour pass for $10.  So that's what I did.

The problems with the Citibike system have been well documented; in just a couple ...

Pintreo Mardi just asked, on the Python mailing list, a very simple question:

Is the Python language an all in one computer language which could replace C, C++, Java etc?

I kind of liked my answer, so I'm reproducing it here:

That's a really hard question to answer, or at least to answer well.

At a theoretical level, when you ask, "Is Python equivalent to C, C++ and Java", the answer is "yes". In computer science, programming languages are classified by whether they are "Turing Complete" or not (google that for more info). In theory, any Turing Complete ...

At Songza, we're very much into testing.  Our test suite currently has over 600 individual test cases, with new tests getting written almost every day.

A test is useless if it doesn't get run, and people being human, if it's a pain to run a test, they won't run it. That means tests have to be fast.  Over time, we've been working on speeding up our tests, mostly by ferreting out some truly horrendous inefficiencies in how fixtures are constructed. We've gone from having maybe 100 tests that took 5-10 minutes to run, to ...

For the last 10 years or so, I've been doing mostly two languages; C++ and Python.  It's hard to imagine two language which are more dissimmilar, but now I understand what the connection is.

This is going to be short, because there's really not much to say.

I just got back from seing Gravity.  It's one of the stupidest movies I've ever seen.  Even by the minimal standards of space opera, it was just plain dumb.  End of review.

As everybody knows, social networks are all the rage these days.  What makes a network valuable is not just how many people are in it, but how many ways those people are connected.  So, if you own a social network, you need to not just work on adding people, but also on getting those people to create interconnections between themselves.

 One of the more interesting social networks out there is LinkedIn.  The graph maintained by LinkedIn is all about people's employment.  Naturally, it's inhabited by recruiters who pay money for the right to search LinkedIn's massive collection ...

In an earlier installment, I wrote, I don't quite understand why, but most programmers don't like testing.  I also hinted that I wasn't completely clueless about the reason.  It's really quite simple.  Their employers tell them that writing software is more important than testing it.  Sure, at the all-hands meetings, some VP will get up there and drone on about how we're all part of the team, and everybody is important in their own way.  Comes payday, however, the message is loud and clear.

I just took a quick look on glassdor.com for engineers ...

I remember the first web browser I ever saw.  I was working at NYU at the time.  Gopher was the hot technology du jour and of course we were running a server.  A colleague called me into his office and showed me some early version of NCSA Mosaic running on an X Terminal (which in those days referred to a piece of hardware).  I don't remember my exact words, but they were something along the lines of "meh".  Another in a long line of personal failures to recognize the next new thing before it bit me in the ass ...

No, on second thought, let's not.

One of the classic decisions any business has to grapple with is make-or-buy. From the smallest private enterprise in the consumer beverage space, to large government agencies in outer space, figuring out whether it makes more sense to roll your own or let somebody else do it for you is a decision that stares you in the face every day.

The amazing thing is that when it comes to scripting languages, the decision is no longer buy-or-make, but download-or-make. You used to have to compare the cost of building something yourself to purchasing ...

A TechCrunch article today an interesting statistic.  100 million person-hours to write all of Wikipedia.  175 million person-hours spent every day on Facebook.  The mind boggles.  I hate posting soundbites like this, but honestly, I can't think of anything more to say on the subject.